Letters

Thus the “ground situation.” The “vehicle” of the plot is Ambrose’s desire to plumb the mysteries of the Occult Order of the Sphinx, a gang of preadolescent boys loosely led by Peter, which “meets” after school in a jerry-built hut along the river shore in a stand of trees called the Jungle. “It was in fact a grove of honey locusts, in area no larger than a schoolyard, bounded on two of its inland sides by Erdmann’s Cornlot and on the third by the East Dorset dump. But it was made mysterious by rank creepers and honeysuckle that covered the ground and shrouded every tree, and by a labyrinth of intersecting footpaths. Junglelike too, there was about it a voluptuous fetidity; gray rats and starlings decomposed where BB’d; curly-furred retrievers spoored the paths; there were to be seen on occasion, stuck on twig ends or flung amid the creepers, ugly little somethings in whose presence Ambrose snickered with the rest…” You get the idea. Exiled by the older boys — who after surprising a pair of lovers in their clubhouse, gleefully enter it for what one guesses to be ritual masturbation — Ambrose wanders the beach with smelly, feisty little Perse Golz, a third grader whom he tries to impress by pretending to receive and transmit coded messages from the Occult Order.

Very painful to remember, these classic humiliations of the delicately nerved among the healthy roughnecks of the world, whom, like Babel his Cossacks or Kafka his carnivores, I still half love and half despise. A message, a message — the heart of such a child longs for some message from the larger world, the lost true home whereof it vaguely dreams, whereto it yearns from its felt exile. “You are not the child of your alleged parents,” is what he craves to hear, however much he may care for them. “Your mother is a royal virgin, your father a god in mortal guise. Your kingdom lies to west of here, to westward, where the tide runs from East Dorset, past cape and cove, black can, red nun,” et cetera.